“I think once people walk into (the show), they'll go, ‘Huh? There's a loom on the floor,” said Cassel Oliver, whose group exhibit Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft opens tonight with a reception.

The loom is part of fiber artist Anne Wilson's new version of Wind-Up: Walking the Warp, which she first performed in 2008 in Chicago. Wilson and members of the Houston ensemble Hope Stone Dance will walk fibers around a 40-yard-long zigzag weaving warp on a 17-by-17-foot frame. The resulting fiber sculpture will be created during two segments, the first from noon to 5 p.m. Sunday, the second from noon to 5 p.m. June 27.

The 20 works in Hand+Made result from similar intersections between performance and craft media like glass, wood, pottery, jewelry and metal.

Materially, Nick Cave's wearable Soundsuits combines sculpture, fiber art and fashion design, but they're meant to be activated through dance. Cave, who directs the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's graduate fashion program and used to dance for Alvin Ailey, will do just that Thursday in a free performance and lecture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's Brown Auditorium.

Anyone who's attended a glassblowing demonstration or watched a potter at the wheel already knows something about the link between craft traditions and live spectacle. But in recent decades, craft artists have increasingly taken spectacle from the demonstrative realm to the performative — especially those trained at universities where the so-called fine arts and applied arts mingle freely and craft students are exposed to the same contemporary art movements as their peers.

At Boston's Massachusetts College of Art, for example, founding members of the collaborative B Team, which was active from 1991 to 1998, honed their skills in glassblowing. But they also drew inspiration from the avant-garde machine performance-art group Survival Research Laboratories. So they began staging glass happenings in which participants wore rubber shoes and danced on molten glass or blew mannequin heads, then dropped them into a tank of water, causing them to bubble and explode. Hand+Made includes two videos documenting B Team's danger-infused happenings.

“You can be as myopic as you want in any of these university settings, but there's also this incredible opportunity for an artist to be as expansive as they want to be,” Cassel Oliver said. “I think this exhibition comes as a result of that expansion — you know, to say, ‘You can pull upon all of these things, and you don't have to choose any one specific thing.' And all of that defies convention. You're really creating new ways of seeing and new ways of presenting.”

Such approaches don't always sit well with older craft artists. Cassel Oliver said Hand+Made grew out of a note-to-self moment during a craft conference session in which she observed “a generational divide in terms of what people's perceptions were of craft.”

“There were people who said, ‘Well, I create work in ceramics, and I create functional objects, and that's what this is about. That's what defines what it is I do. And if you don't do that, then you're sort of bastardizing what ceramics is,' ” Cassel Oliver said. “And there was a whole new generation saying, ‘No, I'm not. I love ceramics just as much as you do, but I also realize that it's more than just a utilitarian object.' ”

Cassel Oliver says she began researching Hand+Made with the idea of “looking at some of the artists who have transcended some of the boundaries of craft … and who are now being presented in a fine-arts context.” But that turned out to be like walking on a land mine — and condescending to craft artists, she said.